Do you have a need for certainty

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Do all Aspies have a need for certainty, always unsure
...which translates to ocd

For eg whether u have this syndrome.
If its true, what causes our uncertainty -> changes, ever-changing society?

Poor short term memory maybe?

I hate uncertainty and entropy.

I don't mind uncertainty at all. In fact if anything is too certain I get suspicious. Things are always changing and will change, nothing is static and predicting the future is difficult. However if we are talking about things that can be easily figured out, I'd just go do it and would not put up with much doubts. Say if I want to know my blood type I do a test to find out. If I wonder if someone has misunderstood me I pick up the phone and call them.

Uncertainty causes me immense distress, especially in social relationships. I wish I lived in a world where people said up front "I like you and want to be your friend" or "I don't like you and don't want to be your friend" because I'm always left guessing and do my head in. Or if I try to make plans with someone and they can't be specific about exactly what time they plan on coming etc. or if it's not specifically stated what we will do, then I get anxious.

I like certainty, but I also think it's good to be flexible & adaptive or have a plan B/C in case a situation changes.

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No for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.

When I'm certain, I would feel more safer. (Even the knowing the fact means danger or bad news...) Than not knowing anything at all for the sake of 'comfort'.

But then, I have to. Even the "Leap Of Faith" is a scary thing, but then I must.

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I was going to say "I don't mind uncertainty" but then I realised that if there is any uncertainty in a social situation, I ask questions until things are certain (or until the people involved are sick of me apparently 'acting obtuse' and asking silly questions and decide they don't want to be around me anymore).
Certainty is definitely a lot easier for me.

I wouldn't go so far as to call it a need, but uncertainty definitely bothers me because it makes life a lot more complicated and messy. I've had to learn to live with it, because I can't logically avoid it. I hated the idea when I first heard about it at school - they had a lesson in which they showed us that questions don't always have clear-cut answers.

Later on in science we heard about the inevitable error in quantifying things, and how standard deviations could be used to quantify the error itself. I think it's very clever how that can be done, moving the data on from "we can't be certain it's exactly correct" to "we are 99% certain that the result lies between x and y." I didn't like it, but it was at least a coping strategy.

I read in a book that "we live in the assumptive world," i.e. we tend to act and think as though we are certain of things that we're not completely certain about. I didn't like that either, but often it's the only way to get anything done. I remember being very literal at work, and when a scientist (verbally) jumped to a conclusion, I thought he'd lost the plot, but he hadn't. He knew he could be wrong, but like most people he simplified what he said, and didn't want to get too long-winded by preceding his every suggestion by "it appears reasonably safe to assume that...." Of course if he'd been writing a scientific paper, he'd have been much more accurate. Interestingly, he was the guy who told me once, when I was being rather risk-averse and slow, "I think we can afford to proceed with more confidence." That's a concept I like to include whenever I catch myself being extremely careful.

Interestingly, it's this stickling for accuracy that lengthens a lot of the things I say, as if I'm afraid of saying anything that isn't absolutely certain and correct. I still have a hard time getting it through my head that nobody is completely innocent of talking complete rubbish.

I've come to be very suspicious of certainty in others, especially in leaders. One particularly nasty form of this is "moral certainty." Ideas about material things can often be fairly accurate, sometimes astonishingly so, but ethics is a very messy subject.

As for faith, the only kind of faith I can understand or do is the kind where a person doesn't know a thing is true for sure but behaves as though it's correct. Best example I know is the New Testament story about somebody lowering a sick man through the roof of a house because it was the only way to get a healer to notice him. The New Testament calls that faith and (if I remember right) says it was the reason the miracle cure was successful. I was puzzled by this when I first heard the story (I was about 6 years old), because from everything else they'd said about faith, it seemed to be a matter of actually believing a thing as a hard fact without proof. I figured that the sick man might have been thinking all the time, "this probably won't work but what have I got to lose?" I felt slightly relieved at that, because I knew I wasn't capable of internally believing there was no doubt about a thing when there obviously was doubt, but I was likely capable of lowering a sick man through a roof, however objective my thinking was.

There is something obsessive / compulsive about it. I keep checking that my bank card is still in my pocket because I want to be certain I haven't lost it, I feel insecure if I've just used it and can't remember putting it away properly. If I fill in a form, unless I really don't care about the result, I worry if I have the slightest doubt that I've got it 100% right. Problem is, much of the time there's no way to be sure. I get hung up on the tiniest dilemmas, and scour the Web looking for the answers. I don't see it as OCD though, I think it's mostly black-and-white thinking and perfectionism. Checking my pockets occasionally doesn't do any harm. And I'm very receptive to input about what constitutes a reasonable risk and what doesn't, and once I've calculated the risk, my decisions are usually quite sane. I'm aware that I probably "play it too safe," and I'm very interested in anything that can help me discover what matters I can afford to take more risk with. Uncertainty, as well as being something of a curse, is often what makes life fun.

Absolutely. I read all the spoilers I can about a new film before I see it. And I also like to watch play-throughs of any video games before I buy them.

I satisfy my need for certainty through my work as an electrical engineer.

This is a good question. I don't think I would say I have a need for certainty, but I definitely crave it. What bothers me most though, is when people treat circumstances as more certain than they really are. If something is 90% likely to happen, then I'm comfortable saying that it's my expected outcome. But it drives me up a wall when people try to say that it's a certainty. For the same reasons, it also drives me nuts when people use absolutes. Words like "always" are almost by definition going to be inaccurate in the vast majority of circumstances that people choose to use them in.

So I guess you could say that I'm comfortable with some level of uncertainty, so long as it's understood and acknowledged by everyone involved that said uncertainty exists.

I really dislike uncertainty. When I first found out that I was probably on the spectrum, the uncertainty of not knowing for sure whether I was autistic or not was horrible. I completely obsessed over it trying to find some kind of certainty. My diagnosis isn't "on paper", meaning it's not in my records, but after testing, I got verbal confirmation by a specialist who deals with adults on the spectrum. Getting confirmation that I am autistic has been a huge relief and has done away with the anxiety from not being sure.

I also hate not knowing what plans are when my friends are doing stuff together. I always ask my friend what the plan is for the weekend, or I try and figure out the exact schedule for a trip we may be going on. I hate not knowing what's going to happen, so I dislike new situations.

Uncertainty sucks.

On the other hand, when it comes to scientific knowledge, I like the fact that we don't know a lot of things. It means we still have a LOT of things to discover. When it comes to the cutting edge of science, like cosmology and quantum physics, I don't mind when scientists say "We don't know how this works yet." I get excited when scientists are working on those kinds of problems.

Uncertainty is a type of logic that is built into our conceptual social structures and languages.
The reason it is built in is because it creates an environment which requires MORE interaction and communication.
This environment is more favorable for the spread of memes, - memes that have uncertainty built into them.

I can deal with uncertainty, as someone else mentioned, when it comes to abstract ideas and facts. But when it comes to events, I struggle when things are uncertain. I especially hate it when plans are changed. If I'm told we're eating dinner at restaurant A at 5:00, but someone changes the plan to restaurant B at 6:00 and I have no input in the matter, I get really irate.